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As a comparison to Peter’s sanity, the editors of the video included the commentary from one Dr. Bouchey (I’m sure she doesn’t shave, so her name is appropriate) as well as the idiot ranting of one Rep. Cummings.

This is one of the most epic pwnings of idiot libtard monetary theory before Congress that I have ever seen.

Here’s how fiscal stimulus is supposed to work: The federal government injects a few hundred billion dollars into a sluggish economy through federal spending. That spending sparks additional consumer demand. And that additional demand drives new economic activity that results in a multiplier effect, in which a dollar of initial government spending creates more than a dollar of economic activity, spurring economic growth and job creation.

That was the basic stimulus theory, as explained by Lawrence Summers, who chairs President Obama’s National Economic Council, at the tail end of 2008. The story was convincing enough: In 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—an $830 billion stimulus package—into law, promising “unprecedented transparency” in tracking how the money would be used and how many jobs it would create.

So how did the stimulus work in practice? Daniel Rothschild, a former researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center who now works for the American Enterprise Institute, wanted to find out. Working with Mercatus Center economist Garett Jones between August and November of last year, he oversaw 50 hours of interviews with businesses and contractors that received and applied for stimulus funding. And what he found was that the on-the-ground reality of the stimulus was far messier than the simple theory behind it.

In his initial report, Rothschild relays an illustrative story about a contractor with 25 years of construction experience, much of it laying tile in government buildings. Heading into an otherwise typical job that he expected to account for about two percent of his annual income, the tile-layer made plans to install standard blocks of four-inch white tiles—the same tiles he usually installed, the same tiles found in other parts of the same office complex, and the exact materials called for in the architectural plans.

Then he got updated specs. The large white tiles were out. Tiny, colored tiles that needed to be laid in an intricate pattern were in. Did it matter that the smaller tiles would cost the government 50 percent more than the larger white tiles? Not at all. In fact, the higher cost may have been the point. The tile-layer told Rothschild’s interview team that “the only reason he could see for using the smaller tiles was to move the money out the door on the ARRA schedule.” So in exchange for their stimulus dollars, taxpayers got a government building with fancier floor tiling.

At other times, they got even less. Rothschild tells another story of a truck salesman who placed a stimulus-funded order for an expensive big-rig. Delivery times on those vehicles range from six to nine months. But stimulus recipients are required to report how many jobs they’ve created every three months. “There was no work that he had actually generated. He was just a salesman,” says Rothschild. And the lag complicated the reporting process as well. “There was no real way to report what would be a fairly normal business transaction.”

Rothschild’s survey results suggest that the law’s reporting requirements, despite having been billed as unprecedented transparency measures, often created more confusion than clarity. In some cases, for example, firms that received stimulus money were instructed by their federal overseers to count jobs created by taking the total amount of money they were given, divide it by some predetermined per-job salary figure, then report the result as the number of jobs created.